On Wednesday 07 March 2007 05:34:15 Jim Fulton wrote:
> I'd love to get some input who know a lot about what makes deploying
> PHP apps so easy.
It's not the packaging format. Most php apps come down as a tarball. Extract
it to your apache root, and you can connect to the app and do configuration,
without even restarting apache (thanks to mod_php). I think the key thing
is that configuring a "well written" php app is done through the web
interface. No mucking with config files, no apache configuration required,
etc. Just have to create a database and a user with permissions to it. If
you'd like a specific example, I suggest trying to install gallery
(http://gallery.menalto.com).
There are sacrifices to make for this approach though: the app has to be able
to write at least to its own config file, and to .htaccess. This means that
security has to be super tight. Frequently the instructions are to chmod 777
the app's top level directory, configure, and then unchmod. Because so many
things can be modified via .htaccess, including directory specific php
settings, you rarely need further configuration.
--
Joseph Tate
Software Engineer
rPath Inc.
http://www.rpath.com/rbuilder/
(919) 851-3984 x2106